6.B Transitions That Introduce Evidence and Mark Its Relationship (REO-1.Q)

Evidence does not arrive naked. A writer wraps it in a signal phrase, and that phrase does more than announce 'here comes a quotation' or 'here comes a number.' It rates the evidence. 'A study found' asks the reader to treat the data as settled fact. 'One study claims' quietly plants doubt, as if the writer suspects the finding is shaky. 'Even critics of the program concede' does something stronger: it tells the reader that the people most motivated to deny this number are the ones handing it over. The number itself never changes. What changes is how hard the reader is asked to believe it.

This matters because evidence lands harder when the reader has been warned how to receive it. A quotation dropped in cold forces the reader to decide its weight after the fact, which is slower and less certain. A signal phrase does that weighing in advance, so the sentence that follows can hit exactly as hard as the writer intends. This is why 'even critics concede' is a favorite move in argument: it borrows credibility from the opposition, and opposition testimony is the hardest kind to wave away.

This skill sits right next to paragraph coherence. A paragraph holds together when each claim-box connects to the next by a visible thread, and signal phrases are often that thread for evidence specifically. Get the phrase wrong and the logic of the paragraph can survive, but the persuasive force collapses, because the reader was told to doubt a fact or trust a guess.